School-community Collaboration in Inquiry-based Learning to Strengthen Religious Character and Improve Learning Outcome of Students

Character education and student, achievement are two main focuses of education in Indonesia in recent years that must be improved. The educators are given the mandate to innovate the learning strategy following the government policy to overcome these problems. This study aims to strengthen the religious character and improve the learning outcome of students through learning innovation that integrated the religious values into learning material that was carried out by involving the school-community collaboration in biology class. This is quasi-experimental research of pretest-posttest non-equivalent control group design that involves 240 participants of four public high schools in Bengkulu Province, Indonesia. The students' religious character and learning outcome were measured using questionnaires and essay tests, respectively. The data obtained were statistically analyzed using the ANCOVA test. The results showed that there was no interaction between the pretest data as a covariate with learning strategies, both on religious character data and student learning outcome. Both religious character and student learning outcomes in the experimental group were significantly higher than in the control group. The results revealed that school-community collaboration in applying inquiry-based learning that integrated religious values can be used as a strategy to strengthen students' religious character as well as improve learning outcomes.